The wood commonly used in pallets and skids is prone to split and is commonly fastened by fasteners which are very hard to pull out. The deck boards are usually spaced apart by about 1/4 to 2 inches, allowing room for a pry bar to be inserted between them and to be used to pry off a deck board from the cross members. Conventional pry bars damage the boards and often split them.
Roof shingle-removing tools, such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,809,436; 4,086,699; 4,203,210, including shovels used as pries as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,113,758, are of little use in trying to raise the tighter-held, thicker surface boards of a wooden pallet. Roof board and floor board removers, such as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,176,363; 3,039,337; 1,343,862; and 5,165,659, require side access to work. For example, the tools of the U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,049,337 and 3,069,139 references require an opening to be first made to provide access to a rafter and so that the operational ends of their tools can be positioned under the boards to be lifted. The U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,659 patent described rigid sharp-edged, relatively thick tines which can be used as a wedge to break through a roof and suggests use by a fireman to do so. Such rigid tools like the conventional crow bars tend to split the brittle wood boards of a pallet or are unable or difficult to be used to "start" pallet board removal at all.
Thus, despite such prior suggestions in the art, there exists the need for a tool which can be used to remove the surface boards of a wooden pallet without removing a first board (to provide access to a cross member) and which does not split or dent an adjacent surface board and which helps to lift a surface board without splitting it.